Our list of the most innovative executives of the year spotlights the people that are pushing the envelope with new products and channel programs to bring solution providers to new heights.
Find out which executives made the grade and held their own, despite the great IT downturn of 2009.
Most everyone loves Thanksgiving turkeys. But IT industry turkeys? Not so much. We look at 10 examples of 'turkeys' that have disappointed the tech industry this year.
A floor plan of Palisades Center in West Nyack, N.Y. shows Dell's new retail store will be on the same floor as that mega mall's Apple Store and Best Buy outlet, and a level below the CompUSA and Circuit City.
Dell's planned store at the NorthPark Center mall in Dallas will place it in the same mall as an Apple retail store, and within a mile of a Best Buy and CompUSA.
According to an analysis by Toni Duboise and John Spindler of Current Analysis:
All the evidence suggests Dell's retail stores are part of an attempt to sieve the golden nugget of wealthy consumers. Examining both the metro- and neighborhood-level context confirms this, but it also shows an important difference. In West Nyack, Dell is attempting to key into the Palisades Center's metro-level comparison shopping potential in the nation's biggest urban economy. With so many key retailers clustered together, this creates a real destination point, perhaps only rivaled by one of Fry's Electronics' Deathstar-of-retailing 100,000+ square footage stores. There is some support for the desire to take advantage of comparison shoppers in Dallas, but also evidence that Dell is interested in being very accessible to an impressive number of highly affluent families.
(You can read a PDF version of their analysis here.)
Should Dell's competitors in the solution provider/IT channel be worried? Well, it doesn't appear so. For example, I stood outside Apple's huge retail store on Fifth Avenue in New York City last week for a segment to be webcast on CRN TV (to be posted later today), and found most people going in and out were either tourists seeing the sights, or consumer-retail level customers making small purchases or getting break-fix advice for their Macs.
With Dell positioning itself to compete with Best Buy, Apple and Circuit City in retail locations, it would seem to be making a statement that it simply doesn't want to leave consumer retail dollars on the table for its rivals to pocket.
Subscribe To This Feed
